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Shutdown looms on the Hill

House GOP leadership’s decision last week to back away from a continuing resolution from the floor amid Republican opposition raises the possibility that Speaker John Boehner might ultimately have to call on Democrats to avoid a government shutdown. He has relied on the minority before, most notably during the fiscal cliff deal that raised taxes on top earners earlier this year.

But Democrats aren’t willing to just go along. For one, they’re looking to use the budget showdown as another opportunity to paint the GOP as a party beholden to extremists.

“Just because you’re an anti-government ideologue who has landed in Congress doesn’t mean you should shut down the government,” House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi said at a press conference last week.

They’re also looking to advance policy goals of their own. Some Democrats think that attaching the Senate’s immigration bill to the CR would effectively counter the GOP effort to use the CR as a mechanism to force the Democratic-controlled Senate to vote on defunding Obamacare.

If Boehner has to go to Pelosi, which likely wouldn’t happen until he’s staring at the prospect of a shutdown, he’ll most likely have to abandon the conservative call to include a defund provision.

So far, none of the Democratic leadership has been contacted by House Republicans to try to negotiate a bipartisan bill. And Democrats are planning to make sure the public knows that.

“They’re going to have a really tough time telling the American people why they didn’t negotiate on something that could gain bipartisan support,” a senior Democratic House aide said.

Last week, in a meeting of the Big Four — Boehner, Pelosi, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and Minority Leader Mitch McConnell — Democrats made clear that any bill with a defund provision would be dead on arrival, both in the Senate and at the White House.

Democrats will be pushing an alternative Rep. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) filed last week. His bill would undo the sequester and set spending at $1.058 billion. It does so by eliminating a number of unpopular tax credits, a rallying cry Democrats feel is a winner compared with Republican calls for cuts.

House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) is pushing a hard line: Democrats won’t back any form of a CR that keeps spending at sequester levels.

Still, aides admit privately that a “clean” CR, meaning no defund provision or any other “gimmicks,” with current spending levels would very likely pick up a chunk of Democratic votes.

If Democrats push back at the spending levels, they worry they could lose the high ground in the debate. Instead of blaming Republicans for shutting down government over Obamacare, the GOP could start blaming Democrats for shutting the government down out of a desire for more government spending.

Congressional Democrats also get the sense that the White House would sign a clean bill at sequester levels to avoid a protracted fight.

While the cry has gotten quieter, Democrats have never stopped talking about the sequester and what they see as cuts that go too deep. In pushing back at the spending levels in current Republican CR proposals, Democrats are going to argue that the reductions go too far.

It’s a risk. In the previous round of sequester discussions earlier this year, Democrats were panned for dire predictions that never appeared to come true.

“The sky was never going to be falling, but I think when you have the CBO say likely 1 million jobs this time next year lost … at some point the sky isn’t falling but there is a serious economic drag,” another Democratic aide said.